“Dad?”
Outside the car, the flash-flash-flash of the turn signal hardly pierced the veil of the shadowy night. Susan was nowhere to be seen, which was just fine because Emmett wasn’t wasting any more time looking.
“Hold on to me,” he said, hoping only he could hear the terror in his voice. He maneuvered himself into the backseat enough to undo Jen’s seat belt. The harness snapped out of its lock and sent Jennifer tumbling clumsily into her father’s arms. Emmett pulled her to him, thanking a god he didn’t really believe in that she was okay.
It was a short-lived reprieve.
The door to the seat Jen was just ejected from was suddenly ripped off the car and thrown carelessly into the night. Susan’s supercharged berserker body filled the space in a flurry of clawing, ripping, angry limbs, flesh, and teeth. It reached for Jennifer with a vicious hiss, just missing her, as she and Emmett launched themselves to the front of the car. Her nails shredded the back of the driver’s seat instead of the flesh of her daughter. Then, as quickly as she’d appeared, she was gone.
Pieces of foam from the seat’s back mixed with the snow and floated in the air like gravity was just a suggestion, not a rule of physics. Emmett tried to remember how to breathe, and his oldest daughter tried to stop screaming. Sucking in breath at last, Emmett put his finger to Jen’s mouth to hush her, and by some miracle she was able to quiet herself down. Pure love dripped down off his cheeks in the form of tears as he locked eyes with her. He wanted to tell her that he was sorry, that he’d never drink again, that he’d be a better father, a better man, from now on, but he didn’t. What he did do was reach into the glove box and pull out a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson .45 snub-nosed revolver.
“Get your sister,” he said as he popped the cylinder and confirmed the gun was loaded. “Get your sister and stay in the car. No matter what happens. Understand? Do not leave the car.”
Jennifer didn’t answer. Her little brain was already working serious overtime to process what was going on. To keep her from losing her mind, there was a certain amount of mental triage happening. But Emmett didn’t have time to repeat himself.
Though he’d never seen a berserker in the flesh, he knew how the rage worked, or at least how it was supposed to work. The first time a person berserked out, they’d be insanely strong and wicked fast, but they’d basically look just like they always had. Up to that first episode there was no way to tell berserkers apart from normal folk, but afterward, HGF would be present in the blood and would steadily increase over time. What exactly HGF was, however, remained a mystery to the scientific community at large. The letters stood for hyper growth factor, which when spelled out did nothing to clear the vagueness of how it worked.
Regardless of the biological mechanics, the results were well documented: Every time you went berserk, the massive steroid-like effect of HGF on the body would give the five- to ten-minute-long episode the equivalent results of months, if not years, of competitive bodybuilding. Berserk out too many times and you’d have the physique of the Incredible Hulk, or bigger. But as it bulked the body, HGF damaged a number of synaptic receptors in the brain, causing the berserker to slowly lose intelligence. Also, HGF, for some unfathomable reason, caused your teeth to slowly fall out, as if your human form was just a child’s body to the monster you would become, your adult chompers just the baby teeth of the demon inside you.
Susan still had all her teeth. Emmett was almost sure of that. So, if Emmett could draw her away from the kids long enough for the rage to run its course, he might be able to save her. Nobody knew, and as long as it didn’t happen again, nobody would have to. Snapping the Smith & Wesson’s cylinder shut, he told himself that even if he died at Susan’s hands before the night was over, as long as the girls survived and nobody saw what happened, he could probably take his wife’s deadly secret to the grave. What he couldn’t know was how strong his self-preservation instinct would turn out to be. He couldn’t know that he, like most folk who try as they might to be the heroes raging against the dying of the light, couldn’t pull off saving anybody, including himself.
Jennifer watched her father as he climbed out of the old Prius through the hole where the windshield used to be. He gave her one final look of adoration, nodded to her sister as if to say the baby was her responsibility now, and then stepped into the abyss that had swallowed their lives.
When Jen turned her attention away from her father trudging through the snow and back to her sister, Bobby-Leigh’s eyes were open. The little girl stared at her, wide-eyed and breathing hard but not crying. How long had the baby been watching? What exactly had she seen?
Jen unfastened the belts of the car seat and pulled Bobby-Leigh into her arms. Trying to telepathically send her the message to keep quiet, Jennifer huddled with her baby sister in the corner of the front passenger seat’s foot well and watched as the turn signal’s yellow light lit the snow and then was beaten back by the darkness, over and over again. Its heartbeat rhythm was oddly calming. Hypnotic. Soothing.
Click. Flash.
Click. Flash.
Click. Flash.
Click. . . Bam!
Jennifer and the baby both jumped out of their skin at the sound of the gunshot.
Bam! Bam! More shots, then nothing.
Bobby-Leigh’s stoicism finally cracked, and she started to cry quietly as the echo of the shots faded and the ringing in their ears was replaced by the click of the turn signal again.
Click.
Click.
Click.
“Daddy? Mom?” Jennifer called out, but got nothing back in response.
“Da-De!” Bobby-Leigh screamed, only to get the same.
Outside the car, maybe fifteen yards deeper into the woods, Emmett stood shaking from the cold, from the shock, from the truth, with the smoking handgun held out in front of him like a talisman. He squinted and peered into the dark, his ears even more open than his eyes, watching, listening, waiting for. . . for anything.
Click. Flash. Nothing.
Click. Flash. Wind and snow.
His teeth started to chatter as the cold dug into his bones.
Fuck. Had he hit her? Had she already worn herself out? Was it over?
“Honey?” he called out. His voice was immediately taken away and silenced by the wind. Nothing. Just the clicking of the goddamn blinker. He wasn’t sure if he should go out into the snow and look for his wife, or head back to the car and gather up his children and make a run for the road. Time seemed to be stretching out in front of him, behind him, above him, below—
Jen’s sudden hysterical screams knocked the sense back into him. He turned back from the abyss and toward the car just in time to see the red-haired demon who’d once been his wife grab the door frame and roll the just over three-thousand-pound hybrid back onto its wheels like it was a big toy. Then, even faster than it was strong, the berserker moved in to rip her children apart.
Emmett raised the gun and fired. His bullet landed square in the demon’s back. The shot distracted it from the girls but left it seemingly unhurt. The berserker turned and leaped into the air. It hit the ground charging. This was his chance. Emmett took it and ran, drawing the monster away.
Back inside the car, Jennifer and Bobby-Leigh curled up against the floorboards and waited for what felt like could only be a painful, inevitable death. But death didn’t come.
“It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay,” the older sister chanted in whispers, not believing a word of what she was saying but hoping that Bobby-Leigh would. They waited. Death didn’t come for them. Jennifer finally stopped chanting and listened.
Click.
Click.
The only sound was the turn signal. Slowly, she poked her head up as Bobby-Leigh watched, wide-eyed but calm. Jennifer surveyed the snowy darkness. Trying to capture the images lit by the flashing b
linker in her brain, as if they were fireflies on a cool summer’s night, instead of potential harbingers of death. But she didn’t see anything or anybody. Just the wind and the stupid turn signal’s light.
Wait! Was there something just at the edge of the light’s reach? Out there in the shadows and swirling snow?
She pressed her face against the driver’s side window, which was the only glass in the car not shattered at this point, and tried to make out what was happening, when all of a sudden—
Hoooonk! Honk! Hoooooooonk!
The sound of the car horn exploded into the night. It caught Jen so off guard that for a long second, she couldn’t wrap her head around the idea that it was the horn of their Prius piercing the night. But when that second was up, she whipped around to see Bobby-Leigh in the driver’s seat, both hands on the horn, about to really press the thing down and wake up the angels who were supposed to be protecting little girls and their sisters at night, but who had clearly fallen asleep on the job. Jen, who thought she knew better than to believe in angels or Santa Claus or peaceful resolutions to conflicts with bullies, grabbed her sister’s hands off the horn and opened her mouth to read the little girl the riot act when—
Smash!
Emmett, the left side of his face hanging off like a half-sliced piece of cheese, landed in a heap on the hood of the hybrid. Bobby-Leigh began to scream as Emmett turned his gruesome visage for what he was pretty sure would be his last look at the two miracles he’d sired.
Survive, he thought as loud as he could, while from the abyss Susan the berserker charged toward them all. Flinching, Jen shuffled back until her head hit the dangling dome light in the middle of the car and knocked it the rest of the way loose.
The light went out. Just the blinkers remained to cut the dark.
Click.
The demon was coming hard and fast, rocketing herself through the snow like a plow, propelled as much by her arms and hands as by her legs. In the strobe-like flashing of the turn signal, what Emmett and his girls saw was more like a series of horrible still photographs than a continuous movement.
Click. Flash. Closer.
Click. Flash. Closer.
Click. Flash—
The berserker grabbed Emmett and yanked him off the hood. He told himself he was ready for the sacrifice he was about to make. He told himself he would gladly lay down his life to save his family. He thought of himself as a hero, and this was what a hero would do. Redemption at last in death—it tasted as sweet as fresh honey in his mind.
But just as the monster that was once Susan was about to tear him apart, Emmett felt the weight of the gun in his hand. He watched himself raise it up and then empty it into the monster’s face as it opened its mouth to tear out his jugular with its teeth. He couldn’t believe he was delivering death at the last second, instead of receiving it like he’d planned.
What have I done?
What have I done?
What have I done?
The question throbbed out of him with each beat of his heart.
What have I done?
He expected to hear himself answer with something along the lines that he’d only done what he had to do to protect his girls. But the rationalizations didn’t come, because in his heart Emmett was sure they weren’t true.
The body of the creature thrashed and twitched and jerked as it bled out and died. But what Emmett saw—through the spasms of muscles twitching and jerking as the demon controlling them slipped forever away—was just his wife, her warm blood mixing with his in the snow. It was like the monster had never been there. And as he lay there next to the body of the woman who had been his beautiful wife, the mother of his children, whom he’d not been strong enough to die for, it was impossible for him not to feel like he’d just murdered Susan in cold blood.
What have I done?
You fucking murdered your wife, you son of a bitch!
He stood shakily up and looked at the gaping hole where her face should have been. Her beautiful red hair drenched in even redder blood. He looked at his daughters watching from the relative shelter of the beat-up old car. Their eyes were so wide and wet and full of questions and fear, they seemed like they might pop right out their beautiful, innocent heads. Little Jennifer’s face was so twisted by her effort not to cry, to be strong, to not add to the misery of her little sister, that Emmett found himself crying for her.
For them.
For himself.
How the fuck was he supposed to explain any of this to them?
But it turned out he wouldn’t have to answer any of his daughters’ questions for a long time, because the police had now arrived—finally—and they had questions of their own that would need to be answered first.
* * *
Jennifer and Bobby-Leigh’s father was sentenced by a jury of his peers to twelve years for second-degree murder. The judge wasn’t happy about it, but he’d be dead soon so in the grand scheme of things, his thoughts on whether or not justice had been done in his court were pretty worthless. The only person in the court that day whose opinion about the proceedings really mattered was Emmett himself, and he had stopped giving a shit the day he’d decided to send the girls away to his brother’s place in Fairfield, Iowa.
As he stood and listened to his sentence read aloud, he knew on some intellectual level that he was getting screwed. The jury could have decided that the murder of his wife was a justifiable homicide and just let him go. In most of the cases that made it to court in those days where a berserker had been killed, the mere fact that the victim had HGF in their blood tended to adjudicate the crime as self-defense. It was a get-out-of-jail-free card. But Emmett hadn’t played it. Even in the ever-increasing number of instances where folks had clearly planned the murder ahead of time, where they had executed the suspected berserker at a time when they were not in any way going berserk and nobody was in any danger at all, even then, juries almost always came back with not-guilty verdicts.
All he would have needed to say was that he’d been afraid for his life and the lives of his daughters, and he could have gone free. But he’d said nothing. It just didn’t matter anymore. So even though Emmett’s actions were by all accounts justified, the jury was guided to focus on the facts that he’d been drunk, that he’d insisted on driving, that he’d been the one who crashed the car and set the whole thing off.
By the time the prosecution was done, those twelve men and women sitting in the jury box didn’t much appreciate the circumstances that triggered Susan into berserking out, and they held it against him. But they seemed to know on some level that they had been in the wrong with their verdict, so they tried to make it up to him during sentencing. Second-degree murder usually carries a thirty- to forty-year sentence, but to appease the judge, who was notably flabbergasted by the decision (and their consciences), the jury granted Emmet a reprieve due to extenuating circumstances, and he was only sent away for twelve.
He watched the gavel bang down.
His lawyer was saying something about how they would appeal and that he’d be able to put this behind him soon. But Emmett wasn’t really listening. He wasn’t going to appeal. His mind was stuck in a horrible memory loop: Susan’s face obliterated by the gun in his hand over and over and over again. He had no interest in an appeal.
When the paperwork came back with the guilty verdict on it and was put in front of him, he signed it without a second thought. He had been drunk. He had killed the mother of his children. Sure, technically it was self-defense, but as far as he was concerned the court still got the basic facts right—like that he had put a hole through the face of his wife in front of his children—and those were what really mattered. Everything else was just window dressing.
He knew he should call his brother Allen and let the girls know the verdict had come in. He knew he should let them know that he wasn’t coming home anytime soon, so they shoul
d just drink the Kool-Aid and join the Transcendental Meditation “movement” like his brother had.
But he didn’t call.
Emmett felt like just about anybody on the planet would be better at raising his daughters than him after what he’d done, and so he just signed where they asked him and boarded the bus to prison. He simply couldn’t bear to see the unbridled hatred in his Jen’s eyes or hear it in her voice again. When Allen had brought them to say good-bye before the trial had gotten underway, his already-broken heart had been crushed to dust.
“You have to tell, Daddy. You have to!” He could still hear how Jen had screamed at him as Allen stood and watched awkwardly, helplessly, in the tiny interrogation room the cops had let them use for the occasion. “Please! Let me do it! I’ll tell them. I saw it, Daddy. I’ll tell them all what happened and you won’t be in trouble anymore.”
She had been there. That much was true. She had seen everything. Bobby-Leigh had too. But they didn’t need to relive it all for the jury. They didn’t need to have their experiences questioned in a cross-examination. At the very least he could still protect them from that. At the very least he could give them a fighting chance at moving on. But more importantly, Emmett didn’t want to be saved; the steel barb of the hook he was on tasted good. It tasted like justice. So, as his older daughter screamed curses at him, he had just shaken his head slowly. No. He would never allow his lawyer to put either of his girls on the stand. Nor would he ever testify on his own behalf.
He was done.
“Go ahead and teach ’em that meditation shit,” he’d said to his brother as the man left with his daughters. “If you think it will help them cope with all this. I’m sorry I always gave you such a hard time about it.”
It was the last thing he would ever say to him, and though Emmett didn’t care about it right then, he’d end up being thankful that his last words to his brother had been relatively kind ones.
Transcendence: Chronicles from the Long Apocalypse: Book One Page 3